Christabelle Noronha

Patrick McGoldrick's fondness for people and cultures and a penchant for languages and cuisines make him a rather unusual technology maven

Patrick McGoldrick has a penchant for getting to the bottom of things. Sample this email the managing director and chief executive officer of Tata Technologies sent in reply to a query about his hobbies: "I looked up 'hobby' in the dictionary to see if I was missing something. Among the synonyms given were avocation, by-line, sideline and spare-time activity. The noun 'by-line' has two senses, 'avocation' has one and 'sideline' has three. I wasn't getting anywhere, so I asked my wife if I had any hobbies. She said, 'You don't; the Tata Group doesn't give you time for one.'"

Inquisitiveness has served Mr McGoldrick well in his professional life, and his sense of humour has helped him accumulate a bagful of funny anecdotes that illuminate a colourful personal outlook.

He describes the place he grew up in — Reno, Nevada, in the still-wild west of America — as best known for "gambling, quick marriages and almost-as-quick divorces". Mr McGoldrick lived amid played-out silver mines, remnants of the famed Nevada 'silver rush' of the 1860s. People migrated to Nevada from all over America and even the world. Mr McGoldrick was a rare native in the mixed community that populated what he recalls was a 24-hour town. "The only time the casinos were closed was on Good Friday," he says, before adding for effect, "from 12 noon to 3 pm."

Summers for Mr McGoldrick were for swimming and fishing, winters for school and snowball fights, while September, October and November were reserved for hunting. "From the time I was nine I would go to the hills and shoot dinner: ducks, rabbits, deer and geese." Mr McGoldrick and his pals made sure the hunting party was always small, three or less. "We might have ended up shooting each other," he explains.

It has been a while since this soft-spoken American traded his rifles for a camera. The shooting Mr McGoldrick does these days is of a more benign kind, with a camera, and he finds his targets in cities such as New York, Rome, Paris, Tokyo and London, where "you turn a corner and something beautiful hits you."

Being a citizen of the world has enabled Mr McGoldrick to cultivate his interests in people and civilisations. That's partly why he moved to Singapore 23 years ago. Since then he has been attracted to various Asian cultures. "I like to go places and meet people I've never met before," he says. Such curiosity has resulted in quaint encounters such as one with a tribe of honey gatherers in Coorg in South India. "The men told me it was their women who did all the work. I asked them what they did. They said they were warriors, that they protected their tribe, even though they could not remember the last war."

So how did this romantic take a shine to technology? The answer lies in a childhood fascination for all things electronic and a neighbour who worked with Nevada Bell and Western Electric. Mr McGoldrick's early tryst with technology enthused him enough to pursue a degree in computer science at Stanford University.

As an adult, the allure of the latest that technology has to offer continues to enthral Mr McGoldrick, professionally and personally. He has the true technology believer's love of gadgets (a half-hearted question prompts him to whip out his palmtop and explain how it works), and just as pronounced a need to move on to the next new gizmo. "My gadgets are good for about nine months to a year," he says. "Then they start looking like garbage."

Because he is seen as a technology maven, it is easy to miss Mr McGoldrick's polymath nature, one that embraces spirituality, linguistics and philosophy. He has read the Bhagvad Gita, the Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, the Quran and the Bible and has more than a passing interest in philosophy.

"While some western cultures have a binary logic that categorises all experience as either good or evil, Buddhism believes there are many shades to the canvass of life. However, in Thailand, a predominately Buddhist country, the logic is binary; everything is fun or not fun. Now, that's a philosophy I can embrace."

Languages, and the cultures in which they flourish, is another subject that exerts a potent influence on Mr McGoldrick, who has studied Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin, Chinese and Malay and has a predilection for drawing parallels between them. He has no qualms about revealing that the comparisons do not always work. "When I was in Italy I presumed that the language was close to Spanish. I used my smattering of Spanish on the hotel receptionist and it worked. Then I tried it with the cab drivers and it worked again. So I concluded that the languages must be similar. Only towards the end of my visit did I realise that the receptionist was Spanish, as were the cab drivers. I probably did not meet a single Italian outside of work, and there we spoke English."

As a 16-year-old Mr McGoldrick trained for the priesthood in a Catholic seminary. The pangs of puberty ensured that the stint was a short one, but he did get to learn the rudiments of Greek and Latin during the period. With Japanese, as also a string of other Asian tongues, Mr McGoldrick was on firmer ground.

"I learned Japanese because my wife is Japanese; I know other Asian languages because I need them to understand and interact with people. Culture is carried by language. To understand people you really have to understand something of the language. During some unsuccessful attempts at learning, I subjected my secretary to voice messages in butchered Malay and unintelligible Mandarin Chinese, which I learned with a tutor from Taiwan. One result of all of this is that I can get you beer or food in Tagalog, Korean, Cantonese and Hokkien, and I can chat about the weather and the family in Thai."

Mr McGoldrick is also a connoisseur of cuisines. "I enjoy eating and cooking. While I was in the US I would cook Chinese cuisine. Now, in Singapore, I enjoy a good old American barbeque. When my children are down we're at the seafood restaurants." Add Italian, Mexican and Mediterranean recipes to the cauldron, besides Indian dishes such as murg malai kebabs and dum pukht.

Eating may be fun for Mr McGoldrick, but more important for him is eating right. "Fitness comes first," says the man who has been weight training regularly for some 20 years. His friends believe this is the only kind of exercise he enjoys, because it is "repetitive, repeatable, and guaranteed to give results".

Variety may not be a mantra Mr McGoldrick likes to chant when it comes to his exercise routine, but he cherishes multiplicity in language, food, people and places. With interests such as these, who needs hobbies?

Also read in Tata Voices

	Bachendri Pal, head of the Tata Steel Adventure Foundation, the first Indian woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest, on the new heights she is scaling
	Jaspreet Bindra, a general manager with Tata Teleservices, on the quizzing game
	Zubin Dubash, executive director, Indian Hotels, on the call of the wild

Uploaded on September 3, 2004